Ferry to Koh Lipe: Germany we have a bobsleigh team

March 10, 2015

The boat to Koh Lipe left at one in the afternoon. Well, it was supposed to. In actual fact we boarded it at one in the afternoon and then waited for over an hour before departing, and when we did finally depart we almost immediately turned around and went back again.

Lining up to get on the ferry. Where'd all these falang come from?!

The hour wait sitting on the top deck of the ferry was at least spent in a useful manner by talking with two German girls, Christine and Lisette, the latter of whom was most interesting because she was a professional bobsleigh rider. Never having met a professional bobsleigh rider before and not knowing much about the sport beyond what I’d gleamed from Cool Runnings I peppered her with questions. They put weights in the sled to make it go faster, they don’t brake at all during the run, no she had never crashed, in fact she was one of the few professionals that never had. She’d even been to the Olympics in Sochi last year.

Being a bobsleigh rider is non-stop action

Although there were a number of other tourists on board the others had chosen to sit below deck and so the outside belonged to just the three of us, but that all changed when the reason for our delayed departure became clear. Another ferry arrived and docked at the harbor as we made to leave, and we then circled back alongside it. This other ferry had a lot of young backpackers and other tourists sunning themselves out on deck fresh from the beaches of other touristy islands further north, and they were told to hotfoot it over to our boat for the rest of the journey. Suddenly our boat filled up very quickly. Local hawkers jumped all over the boat, doing well selling chicken rice and bags of pineapple at twice the going rate, and just about all jumping back before our boat finally got underway.

This chicken rice seller just made it back in time, otherwise he'd have been on his way to Koh Lipe too

The journey took a couple of hours and was mostly uneventful. I spent some of it talking with a young Argentinian biochemist who was here for just a couple of weeks’ vacation. She was very nice to talk to but had naturally been following the tourist trail through Bangkok to the Full Moon Party and she was now coming from the island of Koh Phi Phi (pronounced, rather amusingly, a bit like ‘go pee pee’.) I knew that Koh Lipe was going to be similarly overrun by tourism but Yannis spoke very highly of it (although he’d visited some years ago, before all the tourism really got going) and the snorkeling was said to be very good, which was my main motivation for this island detour.

We finally arrived on Koh Lipe late in the afternoon, or we almost did. Because of the shallow water around the island we had to dock at a floating jetty a little way off shore and then transfer to smaller long-tailed boats for the final hundred metres. And as if having to transfer my bike and all of my bags across the jetty and into one of these small boats wasn’t stressful enough, it soon became clear that the ticket I’d purchased to Koh Lipe wasn’t enough to get me to Koh Lipe at all, and I was going to have to fork out another 70 baht to actually make it to shore. But what choice did I have other than to accept that I was in tourist Thailand now, and that’s the way things worked here.

So near and yet so far, that'll be another 70 baht please. No wonder he's grinning

The long-tailed boat docked at Pattaya beach and it certainly wasn’t the only one. These simple wooden boats were lined up all the way along the beach, two or three deep in most places. On the other side the beach itself was lined with restaurants and guesthouses with big bright signs and people from all over the world drifted by in sandals and sarongs. I loaded up my bike and pushed it up the beach and down ‘walking street’ which was a narrow thoroughfare lined with diving shops and travel agents and restaurants crowded with tourists. As it was getting late and accommodation prices on Koh Lipe were astronomical by Thai standards I found a quiet place in the middle of the island to wild camp, looking forward to snorkeling the next day.

Today's ride: 5 km (3 miles)
Total: 38,773 km (24,078 miles)

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